For anyone looking to stop making compromises, I recommend pixz. It's binary compatible with xz, and is better at compression speed, decompression speed, and ratio than both gzip and xz on multicore systems. I've adopted it in production to great benefit.
Totally agree with this. As someone with a commit bit to the project, as well as a long-time user, I'd like to second the recommendation. Pixz is a terrific parallel XZ compression/expansion tool. I find it indispensable for logs and database backups. Link: https://github.com/vasi/pixz
Fish shell users can take advantage of the Extract and Compress plugins I wrote, which utilize Pixz if installed: https://github.com/justinmayer/tackle/tree/master/plugins/ex...